This Week in Books: “Come, Mr. Miranda. Help me! Help me find my bones!”
“All the experts say I’m sane. / Some even say I might acquire insight someday. / Some even introduce me to their kids.”
Dear Reader,
Here we are, in the heart of horror month, at the peak of the mountain of election madness (shirtless photos of Hunter Biden all over my Twitter feed today for reasons I have not yet had time to fully ascertain; Trump announcing every night that the virus has made him powerful enough to kiss men; the will-he/won’t-he “transfer of power” teasing the American people, getting everyone hot and bothered with the anticipation of satisfaction denied), and, like all of you, I feel my soul pacing around my body, restless with the notion that it will someday be a ghost. How strange it is that it has never before occurred to me how strange it is for Election Day to follow so closely on the heels of Halloween. Here is this year’s schedule: 11/1 All Saints’, 11/2 All Souls’, 11/3 All Vote. In the election’s final act, the dead will be close — they always are, more or less — like I said, it’s just the first time I’ve ever noticed. This year the world is so crowded with the dead, it’s hard not to notice, I guess.
“The Ghosts.” Kuniyoshi Utagawa, c. 1850. The print depicts a samurai fighting snakes, which are conjured by a ghost, as the ghosts of Heian court ladies watch.
The newsletter starts with the cries of a ghost: Ishmael Reed conjures up Diana, the Schuyler sisters’ family slave, eaten by dogs, come back from the dead to haunt Lin-Manuel Miranda. Cristina Rivera Garza guides us through the next level of hell: the “War on Drugs,” which she calls “one of the most chilling spectacles of contemporary horror. Bodies sliced open from end to end, chopped into unrecognizable pieces, left on the streets. Bodies exhumed in a state of decay from hundreds upon hundreds of mass graves. Bodies tossed from pickup trucks onto crowded streets. Bodies burned on enormous pyres. Bodies without hands or without ears or without noses.” Then, in subsequent levels, ever-spiraling downward, ushered forth by various Virgils, we meet the Katrina dead (“one of the most horrific moments in modern American history”), the Yazidi dead (“they are burning virgins alive”), a dead glacier (“a sad, frail sight, disappearing quietly”).
People write books about the most terrible things. When I was a bookseller, when customers used to ask for something to cheer them up (this happened all the time; we were like psychiatrists prescribing pills), I would tell them that it might be a good idea to watch TV, because books are sort of depressing.
Well, we didn’t work on commission.
This is all very gloomy. I think when I started I planned on writing something fun about Halloween? Like, I made a spooky book list, that’s fun. And then I made a Letterboxd, if anyone wants to follow along with T.E.O.T.W.R.’s chilling and thrilling October. Hmmm, feels a little false now though, after talking about mass death! Really knocking it out of the park this week!
Stay spooky,
Dana
@danasnitzky @endworldreview ig fb
1. “Mr. Miranda, Hamilton Left Out a Few Things” by Ishmael Reed, Lit Hub
The book of Ishmael Reed’s play The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda was published last week. It’s surely everything Toni Morrison hoped it would be.
Diana: Mr. Miranda, help me find my bones. My skull. I can’t be buried until my bones are found. I’m sure that some ribs can be found. (Tugs at him; he resists.)
Miranda: (Clearly frightened.) What do you mean, who are you?
Diana: Diana. I ran away from the Schuyler mansion. This White man hid me, but we were found out.
[...]
Diana: Come, Mr. Miranda. Help me! Help me find my bones! I can have an African funeral. With singing, and drums, and dancing with a great feast. Mr. Miranda you wrote that lovely scene where Alexander and Elizabeth are mourning their son Phillip who was killed in a duel. The audience mourned with the actors on the stage.
Mr. Miranda, you must write a scene for me. Their son volunteered for the duel which led to his death. We didn’t volunteer for slavery. What about my father? What about my mother? I was snatched from them when I was a toddler. I was playing in the yard when these White men came and snatched me. They took me to Albany, New York, to the Schuyler mansion. Write that scene for me Mr. Miranda, as you did for the Hamilton’s boy.
Miranda: (Screams. Puts his hands to his head.) Stop.
2. “The Language of Pain” by Cristina Rivera Garza, The Paris Review
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3. “MacArthur Fellow Cristina Rivera Garza Believes That Writing Is an Act of Hope” by Richard Z. Santos, Texas Monthly
An excerpt from Cristina Rivera Garza’s Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, which was published in translation last week, and an interview on the occasion of her being awarded a MacArthur fellowship, which also happened last week! Rivera Garza has lived a fascinatingly transborder life — she has lived and studied on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border, and while she has been living in the U.S. for more than 25 years, she publishes all her work in Spanish, from which it is then translated into English. Plus, as she tells Richard Z. Santos in the interview, there is significant amount of translation involved in her writing process itself:
CRG: I’ve been living in this country for more than twenty-five years now, and I’ve been living, like as many as eleven million people do, a bilingual life. We are, remember, the second-largest Spanish speaking country in the world.
I have developed a method where I write in one language, revise in the second language, then I go back to the other language. It’s been an interesting way of using these languages to actually get exactly the word I need.
TM: It’s like you’re translating yourself twice.
CRG: Yes, in the actual process of writing. I don’t translate my final work into other languages, but the actual creating process does include that act of self-translation.
As for Grieving, it seems like a very profound treatise on the evolution of state violence in Mexico over the course of the last half-century, which proposes collective grief as an avenue of political resistance. As Rivera Garza writes,
What we Mexicans have been forced to witness at the beginning of the twenty-first century—on the streets, on pedestrian bridges, on television, or in the papers—is, without a doubt, one of the most chilling spectacles of contemporary horror. Bodies sliced open from end to end, chopped into unrecognizable pieces, left on the streets. Bodies exhumed in a state of decay from hundreds upon hundreds of mass graves. Bodies tossed from pickup trucks onto crowded streets. Bodies burned on enormous pyres. Bodies without hands or without ears or without noses. Disappeared bodies, unable to claim their suitcases from the bus stations where their belongings have arrived. Persecuted bodies, bodies without air, bodies without fingernails or eyelashes. This is the very essence of horror. This is a more current version of a kind of modern horror that has shown its atrocious face in Armenia, in Auschwitz, in Kosovo.
4. “Impossible Word: Toward a Poetics of Aphasia” by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, Poetry
A long, broad, wonderfully learned essay about the poetry of aphasia by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, who lives with the disorder. She draws on the work of Vijay Seshadri, Harryette Mullen, Chris Abani, and many more, including Baudelaire, who suffered from severe aphasia after a stroke.
Perhaps most famously among poets, Charles Baudelaire contended with aphasia after a stroke in 1866 that left him with a singular utterance available to him through most of the final year of his life: crénom! A curse akin to holy shit! or bloody hell!—crénom derives from sacré nom, or holy name—a French exclamatory swear phrase prefixed to any number of words such as dog, blue, pipe, little boy, Zeus—all as attenuations of God’s name, which may also be used, such that the literal translation is “holy name of X!” as in, Holy name of God!
Holy name: the mockery that aphasia’s lawless brain makes of Baudelaire, of his ability to name, to name anything that remained holy in the infinite glimmer of his spotted mind: what doctors explained to his mother as a loss of “the memory of sound.” His brilliance remained intact, but he could no longer manifest it in the world, neither in social relation, nor in relation on, or with, the page. Holy name: a curse the poet turns back upon the world for shaping itself thus through language lost, and through the losses inherent in putting anything to language. To mark the sacred-profane of what cannot be said because it has become literally unspeakable.
5. “The Anti-Social Novelist” by Vivian Gornick, The New Republic
Vivian Gornick is still out here writing book reviews for The New Republic at 85. Truly, a freelancer’s toil will never cease. Under her formidable consideration is William Souder’s new biography of Steinbeck, Mad at the World. Obviously, since it’s Vivian Gornick, it’s a very good review — good in the sense that it’s like watching someone bring a gun to a knife fight.
The amount of print that has been spilled on Steinbeck would fill an ocean: memoirs, social histories, dissertations, biographies by the yard. Surely by now the cases for and against him as a significant American writer have been sufficiently made. So the question before us is: Do we need another Steinbeck biography—and if so, is Souder’s the one we need? For this reviewer the answer, at least in the second instance, is no.
6. “Soliloquy” by Vijay Seshadri, Bomb
An exquisite poem by Vijay Seshadri. His new collection That Was Now, This Is Then came out last week. “All the experts say I’m sane. / Some even say I might acquire insight someday. / Some even introduce me to their kids. / What could be more reassuring than that?”
7. “Songs in the Key of Life” by Danielle A. Jackson, Bookforum
Danielle Jackson reviews Emily J. Jordi’s The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s.
…Emily J. Lordi [creates] a genealogy of the music through close listening and a thorough review of the contemporary literature, much of it written by Black journalists and critics. “A broader misremembering of the civil rights and Black Power movements” has skewed soul music’s history, she writes, arguing that it was more heterogenous and more imaginative than it’s been given credit for.
8. “Harm’s Way: On Katrina, Disaster, and America’s Possible Future” by Andru Okun, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Andru Okun reviews Andy Horowitz’s Katrina: A History, 1915–2015, which argues, as you can surmise from the subtitle, that “natural” disasters are actually “events with intricate histories,” as Okun puts it.
Stressing the importance of what happened before and after the levee failures, Horowitz’s account begins over a century ago. Hurricane Katrina itself doesn’t appear until halfway through the book’s 200 pages, taking up a small portion of ink relative to the author’s chronicle of events leading up to and following the storm. Readers hoping to be immersed in tragedy or drama will be disappointed, as the author is primarily concerned with policies and practices, the causes and effects of the life-altering catastrophe popularly referred to as “Katrina.”
According to Horowitz, an informed redefinition of disaster requires an understanding of infrastructure and failure. In Louisiana, this more often than not means understanding oil…
9. “Anja Kampmann, High as the Waters Rise” by Fiona Bell, Chicago Review
Speaking of oil, Fiona Bell reviews the poet Anja Kampmann’s novel High as the Waters Rise, which sounds like it might fit Anne Boyer’s definition of literature that tells of the world as it really is under capitalism.
Waclaw, her protagonist, works on an oil rig off the coast of Morocco with his partner, Mátyás. One day, after a shift, Waclaw notices that Mátyás is missing. He is never found, but he is also never looked for. Everyone assumes that he fell off the rig in a storm. In a conciliatory meeting with Waclaw, the boss says Mátyás’s name “in the middle of sentences that sounded like a list of things that were no longer needed.” After his employer sends him to shore, Waclaw begins wandering through Europe, revisiting his sacred moments with Mátyás and reflecting on all the lives that aren’t held sacred.
It is unexpected to encounter a modern-day Moby-Dick with the same dangerous stakes, but, for workers under global capitalism, the sea remains as treacherous as ever. Capitalism’s disregard for human life is as deadly now as it was on the Pequod. Kampmann’s novel is not a love story with a capitalist backdrop, then: it’s a story about capitalism, one that began long before Mátyás’s fall.
10. “What Makes ‘A People’s History’?” by Hannah Zeavin, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Hannah Zeavin looks at the history of people’s histories since Howard Zinn’s and reviews three new entries in the field: Mark Jay & Philip Conklin’s A People’s History of Detroit, Daniel José Gaztambide’s A People's History of Psychoanalysis, and Joy Lisi Rankin’s A People’s History of Computing in the United States.
Zinn’s book is often its readers’ first encounter with a history that centers workers and radicals over presidents and pundits. For the uninitiated, Zinn works “from below” (following E. P. Thompson’s definitional essay in 1966) across the whole of colonial US history through the Clinton presidency (the book was updated until Zinn’s death in 2010). When Zinn’s account is derided, it’s usually because politics are seen as the antithesis of truth — and Zinn’s politics are everywhere in his writing. Of course, Zinn agreed with the accusation that his work was political; that was the point of his project. He lobbed the critique back at his right-wing critics who claimed good histories were apolitical, writing, “One can lie outright about the past.”
11. “The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America – Lisa Z. Sigel” by Eric Aldrich, Full Stop
Ah, and here’s a people’s history that will surely excite you! Eric Aldrich reviews Lisa Z. Sigel’s The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America. Aldrich quibbles with Sigel’s definitions, wondering why so much of the book’s space is dedicated to the outsider artist Henry Darger, questioning whether Darger’s work is really “handmade” or “porn” — but overall Aldrich gives the book a thumbs up. He begins his review with recollections of some dirty crafts he saw as a child at an open-air market, which sound like they belong in the “Satanic” Airbnb:
I recall a few dirty crafts and lowbrow trinkets: a trucker cap depicting a fisherman standing up to his waist deep, while beneath the surface, a fish engulfed his penis like a worm; a circular ashtray decorated with a silhouette of a man and a woman copulating; and finally, I cannot forget the penis pipe with a bowl for “tobacco” in the scrotum.
12. “Farewell to the White Giants” by Andri Snær Magnason, Words Without Borders
An excerpt from Andri Snær Magnason’s book-length essay on global warming, On Time and Water, which reads like a long goodbye.
When I take a photo of a glacier, it’s like I’m recording and preserving an old woman singing an ancient lullaby. After a thousand years, people will peer at the pictures like rare, ancient manuscripts and try to understand what we were thinking.
13. “Conspiracy of Silence” by Madeleine Wattenbarger, The Baffler
Madeleine Wattenbarger reviews Témoris Grecko’s Killing the Story: Journalists Risking Their Lives to Uncover the Truth in Mexico, drawing on her own experience with terroristic police violence against journalists in Mexico.
Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists—by some counts, the most dangerous non-war zone. Five journalists have been killed this year alone; at least 130 have been murdered since 2000. For all its infamy, though, the logic of violence against Mexican journalists is often opaque to outsiders, and I struggle to explain it myself. It often works like a spiral. The state—by which I mean the police, the military, and paramilitary groups—or perhaps not the state, but another group of shadowy interests, understood under the heuristic of organized crime—tortures and/or disappears and/or murders someone. Activists, friends, and family members turn out to protest the violence against that someone, until the same thing happens to them. A journalist covers the new violations, and they, too, become a victim—then the activists who protest for them, the journalists who write about them, and so on.
14. “The Precarious Future of American Farming” by Jason Plautz, Undark
Jason Plautz reviews Tom Philpott’s Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It. There are many bad details to choose from in this review, but here’s one that really stood out to me as something exceptionally bad that I had absolutely never heard of:
Philpott notes that climate change isn’t just making droughts more severe. It is also increasing the likelihood of California’s other “Big One,” a megaflood that could wipe out wide swaths of the state’s crops. The state is typically due for one every 100 to 200 years (the last was more than 150 years ago), and climate change has only raised the odds, as warmer oceans mean more seawater evaporates into the atmosphere to fall over California. A University of California Los Angeles study found that a megaflood is “more likely than not” by 2060…
15. “Contamination: On Qiu Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen Mysteries” by Alex L. Wang, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Alex L. Wang writes about Qiu Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen Cao series, the latest installment of which is Hold Your Breath, China.
Some of the major set pieces of this story are based on real-life events. Shanshan’s story here is based on the experience of Chai Jing’s Under the Dome documentary, which garnered several hundred million views in the span of a few days before being scrubbed from the internet in 2015. Chai’s documentary had a tremendous impact in China, but she herself became persona non grata after the film was deemed “sensitive” from on high. Groups who provided information for the film came under pressure in China and were the subject of anonymous online character assassination. Like in Qiu’s story, one of the villains of Chai’s account is the petroleum industry. A Party security chief named Yong is clearly a stand in for the real-life Zhou Yongkang, an oil boss who became China’s third most powerful man before being sentenced to life in prison for corruption and abuse of power.
16. “Open City” by Kaleem Hawa, Artforum
Kaleem Hawa reviews Zeina Maasri’s Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties, which “[traces] the overlooked visual culture of Beirut’s ‘long 1960s.’”
…The ensuing period of cosmopolitan spectacle in 1960s Beirut is often remembered today with a mix of nostalgia and awe as the “golden years” of Arabic Modernism: Beirut as the “Paris of the East,” home of the bustling Hamra commercial district and its European fashions, of women in miniskirts on the Corniche, poets in cafés on Bliss Street, and museumgoers in the Achrafieh—a city open to all.
…A major part of Beirut’s instantiation as such was its role as a center for book publishers and periodicals. In one chapter, Maasri focuses on Hiwar (Dialogue), a quarterly funded by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) as part of a covert CIA scheme to combat the influence of Communism during the Cold War, and whose global network included, among others, Quest in Mumbai and Black Orpheus in Lagos. Hiwar, which published Arabic translations of W.H. Auden and Czesław Miłosz, was part of an interconnected CCF literary community which could circulate the same chosen writers in multiple languages across multiple periodicals spanning multiple continents. This helped enforce a synchronic transnational canon, shaped in no small part by voices the editors chose to omit, including some of the most active participants in the Communist-aligned Afro-Asian Writers Movement.
17. “Scenes from a Yazidi Refugee Camp, Circa 2016” by Christina Lamb, Lit Hub
An excerpt from Christina Lamb’s Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: War Through the Lives of Women, which is very grim right out of the gate, so gird yourself before you click.
I noticed the Yazidis all had red-and-white cords twisted around their wrists. When I asked what these signified, they explained that the white symbolized the peace they yearned for, and the red the blood of their people killed in previous genocides—by Muslims, Persians, Mongols, Ottomans, Iraqis . . . all their neighbors. They told me the latest genocide, by ISIS, was the seventy-fourth. There had been so much violence against Yazidis that they had a word for attempted extermination—ferman—long before its English equivalent, genocide, which was coined only in 1944 by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin.
18. “Somebody told me we got LA” by Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Lit Hub
I really like this poem from Amaud Jamaul Johnson’s Imperial Liquor. “This tree I started, it’s just a few / states, or branches, into the Atlantic, / which is another form of blackness.”
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